Solus First Impressions

Following the release of my video, which I gave my first impressions of Solus, I thought I would write-up a quick blog about what I found in detail.

Solus is a Linux distribution that has received a fair bit of attention because of its ease of use, so I decided to give my first impressions based off of the idea that I was a first time Linux user, from the installer to the desktop.

The installer was clean and easy to follow, if you are a first time Linux user the chances of you dual booting which require partitioning is pretty slim, so I just kept to installing it via default settings. The installer gave me the chance to add more than just the admin account, which I have not seen before in an installer, and that it also saves time adding say, your children into the system once it’s all installed.

Once the system was installed I was greeted with the desktop, did it stand out? No, it looked like any other KDE/MATE/GNOME environment, but that’s not what all the fuss is about, it’s about installing third-party apps right from the package manager, instead of using the terminal.

So I clicked the package manager and was greeted with a menu which was pretty each to follow, it had categories on the left side, Search etc. I went to search straight away and tried to search for Spotify, it’s a third-party app but it should show up, because ‘Solus’ but to my surprise, it did not, I then saw a third-party tab which I clicked onto and seen Spotify in there. It looks as if the search searches packages in the current repository and the third-party tab is just a bunch of scripts in the backend to install the software.

I cover a fair bit more in the video so watch that, but will I be making a change to Solus from Mint?

The fact is no I won’t, why? Because it’s just like any other Linux distro, I am happy where I am and with how Mint performs and it is not offering anything more than Mint does, and if I want to install Spotify i’ll just use the terminal.

BUT! for new users yes I will be suggesting Solus instead of Mint because of the ease of use.